This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the Coevolving Innovations web site by David Ing.

[Roger Martin]

Howard Gardner has written 21 books

• Changing the idea so that there's multiple types of intelligence
• Harvard Graduate School of Education
• Macarthur Foundation award winner

[Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard University; Author of 20 books including Five Minds for the Future (Harvard Business School Press, March 2007) and Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds (Harvard Business School Press, 2004)]

[Howard Gardner]

Disclaimer:  there are 8 or 9 intelligences, and five minds don't matter on intelligences

• Intelligences, as how the mind has evolved, and how it's organized now
• Instead of having a single computer in the skull, have 8 or 8
• IQ is language and logic
• Have spatial, informational

Five minds for the future is written as a policy-maker

• If I was a czar, and could have an influence over learning, there are five kinds of minds that I would nurture

Background as psychology and education

• These are minds that we should nurture in children
• But should also look for these in organizations, hiring
• In addition, should think about self:  if don't have the mind, can you hire it, or nurture it in the self

Images: Clone, Ginal Kolata

• James Watson's genome has been published

Image: McDonald's, brands

Image: stock exchange

Image: intelligent machines

Image:  virtual reality, Second Life

Image: lifelong learning

Image: auto-didacticism, for Dummies

Can't just treat people traditional knowledges, finish at age 20 to 30, and then rest on laurels

• What minds will be valuable in the future?
• Five minds

What was the greatest invention of hte last 2000 years?

• Said classical music, Mozart
• Gave this answer, because wanted to be quoted

More serious answer:  the Disciplines (#1)

• Scholarly, but also arts, crafts
• We take disciplines totally for granted
• Disciplines are invented by human beings, over eons, and they might have never been invented
• A lot of things depend on the disciplined mind

Three sense of disciplines:

• 1.  Keep working on stuff, it gets better
• 2.  Thinking in scholarship
• 3.  Becoming expert in something:  an art, craft, profession
• All three senses of discipline are important
• If don't have discipline, will work with others

Basic argument for the disciplined mind

• Learning discipline is learning a language
• Listening to two experts, there's knowledge that you can't poach on
• Now, so much is interdisciplinary, so knowing one discipline isn't enough

For each discipline, false

• There's no cigar, i.e. knocking down a kewpie doll

Arthur Rubenstein, prodigy in 20s

• Became a sybarite:  carouse, didn't practice
• Played with flourishes, but wasn't getting better
• In his 30s, got married, and decided to practice 4 to 6 hours
• If I don't practice for a day, I know it; if I don't practice for a week, the orchestra knows it; if I don't practice for a month, the audience knows it

Hyper-discipline:  changing dinner table into a courtroom

• Shouldn't see everything through a disciplinary lens
• e.g. rational choice theory is useful, but not everything

2. The synthesizing mind

• Darwin:  spent 5 years observing, then next 30 years communicating, then produced the Origin of the Species
• A book more valued the farther north you go, don't go too far south

All of us are inundated by information

• The synthesizing mind decides what to pay attention to, and what to ignore
• Puts things together so an individual can retain it
• Then the synthesis needs to be communicable to other people
• Murray Gell Man:  In the 21st century, the most valuable mind will be the synthesizing mind

Psychology:  nothing on the topic of synthesizing

• May be ways of teaching it, but no formal literature on this
• In book, talk about how this would work

If want to synthesize, need to know what will happen at the end

• Then where to start, where to go:  what position papers, movie, state of the art
• Then what disciplines will you draw on, that is relevant?
• Then what method to bootstrap the synthesis, so that the synthesis off the shelf can be improved
• Don't wait until the last night:  try provisional synthesis, and people will tell you what's missing
• Then here it is, and move on

Believe that there will be whole schools that will teach synthesis

• Bill Clinton:  What presidents need is a synthesizing mind

Syntheses that don't work take in too much

• Are else they're eccentric, and don't fit
• Two books:  Ken Wilber, Griesen
• What makes a good synthesis

3.  Creative mind

• Einstein, Virginia Wolff, 
• Have spent much of life thinking about what creativity is

Can't be creative unless have mastered a discipline

• Kid's drawings won't go into a museum
• Takes 10 years
• Also need to know what's been done before
• Can think outside the box, but need to know what the box is

Creator raises good questions, new questions, finds problems (not just solves)

• Creating is as much about institutional power as computing power
• Creative person has to be willing to step out and do thinks that haven't been done before
• When ridiculed, have to pick self up, and try something else

Freud came to America in 1909, couldn't stand U.S.

• Jung came, liked it, sent Freud a note
• Freud said:  what did you leave out?

Creativity is judged by other people in the field

• In business, it's customers or shareholders

Not creative, failed:

• Ether
• Cold fusion
• Most best sellers
• Most biennial art shows

Two additional minds, wouldn't have written about them as a cognitive psychologist

• Respectful mind and ethical mind

Respectful mind: world is diverse, have contact with people around the world

• Need to tolerate people, but respectful mind embraces diversity, give people the benefit of the doubt
• At least as important in commerce and corporate life

Close, but no cigar:

• Kissing up, kicking down:  Bob Sutton, anti-asshole
• Bad jokes, at the expense of others
• Respect with too many conditions:  Kant, people aren't entitled to respect, no matter what they do

Promising instituitions:

• Commisions on Peace and Reconciliation:  people being regretful for what they've done
• Artistic ping-pong:  Mid-east orchestra with both sides playing, silk road orchestra

Changing minds:  Have changed own mind on whether there should be penalties on where should allow scarves in France, and cartoons in Denmark

• Concluded cartoons shouldn't have been published:  too much damage, to indulge a cartoonist
• In a world where everything is connected, we need to have a higher standard for what we share outside our own mind

5. Ethical mind

• Begins at day one, should have respect
• Disrespect from day one leads to bad
• Ethics: self as worker and a citizen
• Not just what are rights, but what are responsibilities (as a manager, lawyer, painter, physician), and how to I carry them out?
• Territory between courtesy and illegality: could get away with it legally, but decide not to

Good work project:  Bill Damon, Czisentmahali

Three E's

• Excellent quality, good discipline
• Engaging, we like to do it 
• Ethical:  moral within work and citizenship

Want people to have all three E's, how do we engender this in young people?

• Martin Luther King, Gandhi

Young people know good work, but a large number know that they can't be good workers when they're young

• Their peers don't want to give up opportunities to get ahead
• Good, but not know
• Augustin:  make me chaste, but not quite yet

No cigar:

• Work that is compromised, people getting away with what they can
• e.g. tests in education, not developing
• Bad work: Enron
• Perplexing:  Lord John Brown of BP, thought of well earlier, but then questions arise about what the company doesn't do
• Full responsibility needs to have a grounded meaning
• Next book: Responsibility in the Workplace

Role of education in nurturing these minds?

• Bring attention to them, at conferences like these
• Know about examples, good and bad
• Be in personal contact with people with these types of minds
• Mentor, tormentors and anti-mentors
• Meaningful work and meaningful life:  fragmentors, taking parts of people
• Even if have all five minds, not certain how to synthesize them
• Have to overthrow mentors, that's why a lot of Asians move to the west

Two questions:

• Aren't there other minds?
• How can you be in favour of censorship?

Martin Luther King:  Education and discipline

Emerson: Character is more important than intellect

Changed mind:  was studying, in an amoral way

• Can justify this as a scientist, but now a citizen, particularly in declining years
• Don't need more of best and brightest, need more people who are decent

[Questions]

How to formulate to create a common standard on the five minds, particularly on respectful and ethical?

• Difficult
• Respect is easier, because disrespect means not giving the other party the benefit of the doubt
• Universals: don't lie, don't hurt; then move to more specific
• Not bribery, but facilitation payments

12-year old daughter being challenged on short-term memory, not on creativity

• As parents, have to counter messages in society that we don't have sympathy
• Put some rules into effect
• Parents have to make an extra effort in the areas
• Patient, rewards don't come easily
• Children observe what is being done
• Sometimes choices of schools and teachers, and may exercise them
• But parents create antibodies for things we don't like
• As parents, also have to help kids, e.g. SATs

Can respective for others and ethical behaviour exist without self-respect

• Reciprocal:  if you treat people respectfully, it creates ways they'll treat you

Consider the religious mind, and ethics?

• Deliberately avoided religion and spirituality, as enemies would find inflammatory
• Good work project, across disciplines
• Impressed by a lot of good workers who emphasize religious beliefs early in life, even when they're not practicising
• When religion turns to intolerance, then it's pathological
• In the U.S., there's a lot of pathological behaviour

Clarify that people don't receive respect?

• Dershowitz:  if next to Hitler, would strangle him myself
• There are behaviours that trump respect
• Removal of people from positions of authority, and shunning signals that people no longer deserve respect
• Penalities have to be over a longer period of time
• Vivian Hailey:  If you don't save, you can't play

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